It’s not just Putin, it’s the Russians

According to Bruno Kahl, the outgoing head of Germany’s intelligence, the Russians are likely to test NATO commitment to Article 5 of its Charter within a few years.

“We are very sure, and we have intelligence evidence to back this up, that [Russia’s full-scale invasion of] Ukraine is only one step on Russia’s path towards the west,” he said. “We see that NATO is supposed to be tested in its mutual assistance promise. There are people in Moscow who don’t believe that NATO’s Article 5 still works.”

There are people, one person to be exact, in the room where I’m writing this who tend to agree. Putin sees the Ukraine not as the final destination but a step along the way to reconstructing the Soviet Union.

Things may change but, as they stand now, I can’t see NATO countries counterattacking Russia should her tanks roll into Lithuania or Estonia. They are more likely to take the tail end of Article 5 literally, where it says that NATO would be “taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”

No tripwire exists, in other words. Should push come to shove, NATO may well deem the use of armed force unnecessary and wash its hands, Chamberlain-style, on “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

However, I disagree with Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, who says that: “Our experts estimate that it [Russian invasion] could be possible within a period of five to eight years.” Two to three years seems more likely, for afterwards there will be a different president in the White House, one conceivably less friendly to Putin and more committed to collective security.

Yet my subject today isn’t NATO but Russia, specifically her people’s readiness to expand the on-going war all over Eastern Europe. A comparison with the Second World War seems instructive.

Then Stalin’s people went into the war having suffered unimaginable persecutions in the previous 20-odd years of Bolshevik cannibalism. Some 40 to 60 million Soviets had perished in CheKa cellars and death camps or starved to death in deliberately created famines – and that’s after 10 to 15 million had died during the Civil War the Bolsheviks had started.

There was hardly a family in the Soviet Union that hadn’t lost some relations under the wheels of the Bolshevik juggernaut. Add to this the Baltics and parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Stalin after his Pact with Hitler, and you can see why swaths of the Soviet population hated Stalin and his regime.

This they proved during the initial phase of the war, when Soviet soldiers happily surrendered en masse, four million of them in the first three or four months. They simply didn’t want to fight for Stalin, although over a million of them were happy to fight for Hitler.

Those interested in how Stalin forced his people to change their minds could do worse than to read the book Stalin’s War of Extermination (Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1945) by the late German military historian Joachim Hoffman. Suffice it for me to say here that the situation in today’s Russia is different.

Her KGB government has expertly pushed the right buttons within the popular psyche, and by and large the Russians support Putin and his war on the Ukraine.

Unlike their Soviet great-grandparents they have lived through a couple of decades of relative prosperity (understood by Russians as having enough food, some clothes on their backs and a roof over their heads, even if it comes with no indoor plumbing) and, again relative, freedom (if you say nothing against the government, you’re unlikely to get arrested).

What to any sensible Westerner would look like appalling destitution and despotism looks to Russians as a decent life. Moreover, those who don’t see it as decent enough have been free to leave, an option that wasn’t available to Stalin’s slaves.

Hence you’ll see many outbursts of febrile patriotic fervour complete with the kind of mass belligerence I never saw during my life in the Soviet Union. However, screaming “We can do it again!!!” at rallies is one thing and joining the fight is quite another.

Here is another massive difference between Stalin’s Red Army and Putin’s version. Stalin’s was an army of recruits, most of them reluctant to lay down their lives for the motherland, at least in the early stages of the war. This though, technically at least, the Soviet Union was a victim of a foreign invasion.

By contrast, Putin’s army is mostly one of contract soldiers, those ready to murder, loot and rape for money. The pay is considerable by Russian standards: somewhere between £2,000 and 3,000 in our money as a one-off sum, plus salaries some 15 per cent higher than the median income in the country, plus compensation for wounds.

Moreover, the families of the soldiers killed in the war are well taken care of, again by Russian standards. They too get a one-off payment, all sorts of discounts and privileges, a preferential treatment for their children going to universities and so forth.

If the Russians refer to their part of the Second World War as Great Patriotic, this war could justifiably be called Great Transactional. Please keep in mind that, if in 1941 Russia was a victim of aggression, in 2022 she became the aggressor. This doesn’t deter all those swarms of guns for hire.

Nor does it deter their parents and wives who encourage their men to enlist as a way of improving the family fortunes. In fact, even Kremlin sources accept that it’s mostly not patriotism but money that’s drawing young men into Putin’s criminal army.

But there is a problem with armies that fight a criminal war in criminal ways. Such an army also becomes a criminal enterprise internally, not just externally.

In fact, many Russian soldiers have to part with much of their blood money just to go home alive. Russian officers have a menu of ‘services’ they can provide, and the soldiers can choose those that may help them keep life and limb.

These include being excused from going on what the Russians call ‘meat storms’, paving every inch of gained terrain with corpses, mostly their own; an assignment to rear duty; transfer to a unit far from the frontline.

Officers don’t just offer such services. They also extort money in more direct ways, such as beatings, torture, refusal to compensate for wounds and even threats to throw a recalcitrant soldier into battle unarmed.

The business is brisk, and not just for officers. Another rapacious category is made up of women called ‘black widows’. These young ladies start correspondence with soldiers on the frontline and marry them during their brief R&R specifically to get the ‘coffin money’ should their newlywed husband get killed.

If in 2022 and 2023 the widows of fallen soldiers would beg the commanders to send the body home, these days, according to Russian military sources, they don’t bother with such sentimental nonsense. Never mind the body, just give us the dosh.

Recruiters are also having a good war, and again the capitalist profit motive is strong. Since recruiters get a percentage of every joining-up fee, they lie to youngsters that they would be used only in the rear, far from the frontline. Such recruiters operate mostly in the provinces, where people are more gullible.

Old-fashioned pressganging is also practised widely, with the recruiting kidnappers often able to gain access to their victims’ bank accounts and withdraw the joining-up fee. This supplements nicely the crowds of youngsters actually willing to kill for a fee.

Would the situation change if they saw not Ukrainians but Lithuanians or Poles in their crosshairs? I can only answer this question with an unequivocal ‘that depends’.

The Russian population is so thoroughly corrupted that I can’t envisage any moral barriers in the way of expanding the war all over Europe. But these aren’t the only possible barriers.

Although the Russians are kept out of the reach of independent media, rumours have a way of spreading. As more and more young men return home in body bags or, if they are lucky, without a full complement of limbs, a growing number of families will be genuinely bereft. The stories of soldiers being cheated of their blood money can’t be kept under wraps for ever either.

It’s also quite possible that, should Putin decide to test NATO’s commitment to Article 5 by attacking Europe, he may have to test the Russians’ commitment to fighting by introducing general conscription. That he has so far refused to do so suggests that this isn’t a test he thinks he can pass.

Neither is it certain that he can embark on a new adventure before the war in the Ukraine has ended, and it is showing few signs of doing so soon. Of course, Putin may decide to hasten the end by using nuclear weapons, but I don’t wish to go there. That would be one conjecture too many.